Next came the residents of the town itself, factory workers and the Party-appointed managers who supervised them. Leonid was surprised to see that they dressed barely better than the farmers, in simple, shapeless clothes, the kind he remembered from his own childhood in Bohdan. The people of Moscow had adopted fashions more like those in London and Paris, not quite so flashy, but nowhere near as subdued as here. Standing all together outside the church, these people seemed a gathering of monks.
The crowd continued to grow, the first trickle of people inflating to a steady flow, as if each side street were a branch of a river delta emptying into a sea around the old church. A sea of tired faces, but Leonid noticed excitement, too. And not just from the children, more and more of whom were being hoisted onto a parent’s shoulders for a better view. The people buzzed, like the engineers in the bunker before a launch. Leonid saw his own face throughout the crowd on cheap pins and buttons, the znachki that had been popular since Nadya’s launch. One little girl had a dozen versions of Leonid’s face stuck to her threadbare blouse. Plenty of the adults in the audience had similar displays, some with pins for each cosmonaut, arranged like the mural Giorgi had painted at Star City.
The astronomer reached into the truck and pulled out a microphone. A wire ran from it back into the truck. Two speakers were mounted from the underside of the open panel.
“Good evening,” said the astronomer. The speakers squealed. She reached back into the truck and twisted a knob and the feedback silenced.
More children were hoisted onto more shoulders, joining the statue of Lenin as the highest things this side of the church. Little monuments, Leonid thought. How many people were here? Two hundred? Leonid would ask Ignatius after the event.
“We’re here this evening,” said the astronomer, “to explore the cosmos. Soviet science has exposed the whole universe to us, and now we can bring it to you, the Soviet people. We can fit all of creation into this truck, our planetarium.”
She reached back to the truck and flipped a switch next to the knob that had controlled the volume. The domed device on the ground emitted light through pinprick holes, casting constellations onto the black-painted underside of the open panel. Like the opposite of a film screen, Leonid thought. A spattering of applause came from the crowd, soft chatter.
“We now know,” continued the astronomer, “that the stars are not dots of light on the firmament, but suns like our own, impossibly distant. But not as impossible as we once thought. I’m joined today by two people who have reached for the very stars and touched them. In exploring the cosmos this evening, we’ll be joined by two of our great Soviet heroes, two of our cosmonauts, the first and also the most recent.”
The applause came in earnest, and Leonid raised his hand into a hearty wave. He did not need to think about it, the wave just happened. He wondered if his arm would start waving on its own anytime he heard clapping. Pavlov’s cosmonaut.
Ignatius nudged Nadya, who shuffled forward and waved, too. The motion was never natural with her. Or maybe it was completely natural, while Leonid’s was absolutely false. It just appeared, to anyone looking, to be the other way around. Regardless, Nadya’s awkwardness had never hurt her. In fact, it seemed to endear her all the more to the public.
Leonid lowered his arm and stepped back and Nadya did the same. The applause trickled out.
The astronomer reached into the truck and flipped another switch. The dome started turning, shifting the fake stars projected on the black screen.
“Ancient people,” she said, “used to invent gods to explain the movement of the stars. They could only see themselves as the stationary point around which the whole universe spun. It took but a few simple observations to disprove this, to show that it’s the movement of the Earth that makes the stars seem to shift so rapidly. Yes, the stars move, too, and so fast you can hardly imagine, but they’re so very, very far away that their motion is imperceptible except when measured over a long, long time. Think of how nearby trees seem to rush past the window of a train, while a distant mountain barely moves at all. Stars are millions of times more distant than that mountain.”
A blue-gray dot, larger than the other simulated stars, crept up from the right corner of the screen. When the dot reached the center, a click came from the projector, and its motion ceased. The astronomer whipped her pointer up, rapping it against the metal screen.
“This is Saturn, one of nine planets that orbit around our sun. Tonight, I’ll be showing you the real Saturn through our telescope”—she tapped the telescope with her pointer—“and we’ll even be able to see the planet’s majestic ring system. There are many of you this evening, so while I show each of you in turn, I’ll ask that my comrade cosmonauts answer your questions.”
She instructed those who wished to look through the telescope to form a line, and then handed the microphone to Nadya. Nadya inspected the microphone as if it were an unfamiliar thing. She held it up, pressing it against her lips.
“Hello,” she said, almost swallowing the microphone. Her voice boomed from the speakers, followed by a brief electric whine. She handed the microphone to Leonid.
“What would you like to know?”
Hands shot up throughout the crowd.
People asked the usual questions: What was it like in outer space? What does weightlessness feel like? How is that food you eat that comes from tubes? Were you scared? To this last question, the answer was carefully scripted: Absolutely not.
Leonid addressed most of the questions, holding the microphone over to Nadya from time to time. Her answers were always brief, almost curt.
Leonid pointed to an older woman—from a farm by the look of her—standing in the middle of the crowd. She had kept her hand raised the whole time, even when Nadya and Leonid were answering the questions of others.
“I read the newspaper,” said the woman. She paused, as if that were all she planned to say. Leonid started to respond, but she continued, “I’ve read every article about you cosmonauts.”
She paused again. This time Leonid waited. The child peering through the telescope exclaimed into the silence, “I can see Saturn’s moons!” A ripple of laughter passed through the crowd.
The old woman continued, “I lost both my sons in the war.”
“I’m sorry,” said Leonid. “I lost my father.” This was both true and part of the fake history the Chief Designer and Tsiolkovski had crafted for him.
“Then how can you say in interviews that there’s no god? That there’s no heaven? When they used to let us come to church here, the priest always told us about heaven. My mother always told me that if I was good I’d go to heaven. And that’s how I raised my boys. What’s the point of being good if what you say is true?”
“Science has explained things better than religion ever did,” said Leonid, quoting directly from the list of potential questions and answers Ignatius had made him memorize.
“But where are my boys?” asked the woman, her voice heavy with pleading. “They were good, good boys. Where do the good ones go?”
There was another line Leonid was supposed to say at this point, but it caught in his throat. He stammered. His brother, the good one, literally gone to the heavens. He imagined that this woman was his own grandmother, begging for answers from the soldiers after Tsiolkovski had taken him and his brother away. He said several more disconnected syllables, unable to string them into words.
Nadya slipped the microphone from Leonid’s hand.
“If good only occurs because of a desire for reward and a fear of punishment,” she said, “then good isn’t worth much. Your boys were good, yes, and you spent good time with them. But they’re gone. Not even the saints painted on the sobor walls will be seen again. Except as paintings. Good is not staring at paintings wishing for them to come to life. Good is action or deed or sacrifice. Good is actually living life, not longing for a lost past. Not pining for a false future.